Post op-ed writer Milbank beats dead horse of citizen control

Dana Milbank issued a whiny op-ed this morning, using the recent Columbia, Maryland mall shooting to call for more citizen control laws.

With so many shootings, it’s perhaps inevitable that the Columbia incident seems almost routine. The weapon used, a 12-gauge Mossberg shotgun, was ordinary, and the shooter reportedly had no criminal record and bought the gun legally.

But it is this sort of numbness that the women outside the White House are trying to counteract with their weekly vigils. They stand in the closed-to-traffic stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue, as few as two of them and as many as a dozen, wearing “Stop gun violence” pins and yellow crime-scene tape, and buttonholing passersby during lunch hour. Their signs bear messages such as “Shame on the U.S. Senate” and “Who gave the NRA so much power?”

The women are not motivated by any personal connection to gun violence but by a generalized outrage. They have been involved in demonstrations since the civil rights and Vietnam War movements of the 1960s, but nothing recurring like this.

At first, they had plenty of company outside the White House from the Brady Campaign and other gun-control organizations, but “after Newtown, those groups got swamped,” Elsas said, and the groups decamped to work on gun legislation that ultimately failed.

Milbank throws some context-free statistics on the table about recent mass shootings, and fails to mention that we are experiencing in multi-decade decline of both violent gun crime and “accidental” (negligent) shootings. These drops in criminal firearm use are occurring as more law-abiding citizens people are buying and carrying guns and are pushing (successfully) to carry arms in more places, restoring their natural rights one step at a time.

Milbank clings to his sad handful—typically, not even a handful—of old citizen control protesters that hang out with the other clumps of perennial lost causes outside the White House.

But his screed lacked… something.

@bob_owens@Milbank He can’t tell you. If he could tell you, he would have. But he can’t. Because he’s just posturing and he doesn’t know.

Milbank can’t point to a single gun control law that has been proposed that would have prevented the Columbia Mall shooting, or the Sandy Hook massacre, or last year’s Clackamas Mall shooting (which was stopped by the presence of a concealed carrier named Nick Meli, as we’ve noted before).

He can’t point to the “success” of so-called “gun free zones,” because they are specifically chose by would-be mass killers time after time after time, as places where they can find large numbers of unarmed victims.

Like his fellow citizen control cultists, Dana Milbank is quite certain in his mind that more government is good government, and that stripping away the Second Amendment right to self defense is a “good thing,” but he doesn’t provide details on what would or why… for a very good reason.

Bob Owens is the Editor of BearingArms.com.
Bob is a graduate of roughly 400 hours of professional firearms training classes, including square range and force-on force work with handguns and carbines. He is a past volunteer instructor with Project Appleseed. He most recently received his Vehicle Close Quarters Combat Instructor certification from Centrifuge Training, and is the author of the short e-book, So You Want to Own a Gun.
He can be found on Twitter at bob_owens.
https://bearingarms.com/author/bobowens-bearingarms/